In prior telecommunications management networks, it was necessary to manually input the identities of the communications system elements within the network. The identity information was required at each element in the network. Consequently, when a network element was either added or deleted, each of the elements would have to be manually updated with the identity of the element or elements being added or deleted from the network. Additionally, when adding a network element, all the identity information of the other elements in the network would have to be manually inputted into the new network element. Such manual inputting of the identity information into the network elements is not only time consuming, but prone to errors. Another shortcoming of prior such management networks is that physical records of the identity information had to be maintained in order to know the configuration of the network elements.